 Welcome folks. As you might expect, we'll give it a couple minutes to let people start filtering in, but I'd like to invite you to answer a check-in question in the chat. What's something that you already knew about yourself when you were age five, or what's something that hasn't changed about you since you were five years old? For those just joining, we have a check-in question that you're welcome to answer in the chat. We're going to give it until five after the hour to make sure we've got everybody here. So welcome folks. As you join, you're welcome to answer the check-in question in the chat about what's something you already knew about yourself by the time you were five years old. And Andre is asking in the chat if other folks will be talking during this. I'll go over agenda in a minute, but there will be breakout sessions at about the half hour left mark where people will be invited to participate, but until then you're safe to be in a noisy room. And we'll give it another two minutes or so. Thank you for all your answers in the chat, by the way. This is a fun check-in question. I'm seeing not as many participants binging as they enter the room, so I think we're ready to get started. Thanks everybody for coming, and thanks again for participating in the check-in exercise if you did. If you haven't yet, you're welcome to about something you already knew about yourself at age five. Welcome to Edgy's Fifth Birthday Party. Day after election day might be a little early to call it exactly Edgy's Fifth Birthday, but I think it's an approximate date. I wanted to do this check-in question because even though five is pretty young and there's a lot of learning and growing ahead, there's a lot of things that'll change about you as you grow. You're already you, and as Edgy turns five, that's what I want to show you, not just what we've done, but how we work and why we do this work. I want to invite you into a space that's really special to me and to a lot of us here. I'm hoping to bring some of not just edgy accomplishments, but edgy energy, and there's a lot of people here, Edgy, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, I should say, the acronym straight out. There's a lot of us here who have been here for a while, people who've been here and then haven't had a chance to come back for a while. There's people who've been involved in supporting Edgy in his early times and up through the present, so I really, really appreciate you coming. We have a lot of Edgy members in chat as well, so if you have tech support needs or if you have a question or if you would just want to DM somebody you haven't seen in a while, please feel free. We do have a code of conduct that's in the chat. If Sarah, if you want to paste that again, that'd be helpful. Thank you. Sarah Wiley is doing our breakout rooms and tech support hosting in the chat today, but I also want to invite you to bring your, you know, the adjectives you might have applied to yourselves at five years old to this space. Come curious, come creative, come ready to ask interesting questions. Ask questions in the question time. We're going to end up with a pretty compact presentation, so if you have a pen and paper handy, that might be nice to save some of your questions to the end. And if it works for you and for your internet connection, I invite you to leave your cameras on so that we can all see each other's faces and reactions as we go. Agenda-wise, and Chris, if you'd like to pull that up. Today we're going to have Chris talk about Edgy's work over the last year and a little bit of setting up in the space of the last five years, which is a very tall order, by the way. Edgy works across several working groups that are not necessarily easy to, you know, everybody wants to talk about their various accomplishments. So trying to compress that into what the 15-minute slot that I've dictated is going to be very challenging, but we'll see how he does. And following that presentation, I'll go live with Marianne Folven just to talk about the work she's done volunteering with us across several years. And that at the half hour, we will open breakout rooms and you'll be able to hop between Edgy's different working groups to say hi, to ask questions, help celebrate and learn about, you know, what we've done, more details, or the future. And again, Chris's presentation will detail what the different working groups are. So that should help you a bit if you, if you want to write down a group that's especially interesting to you, to make sure you hop into that breakout room during that time. That'll be a 20-minute period at the end, or towards the end. We will keep the presentations pretty short because we want to leave lots of room for you to chat with us and hear each other's excitement and talk about what we're really here to do. Finally, thank you very much for being here. I see so many different people who've supported Edgy, who supported me personally, who supported Edgy's work broadly and the space that we're in, and I really appreciate it, and especially also the people we haven't met yet who are just joining today to find out a bit more about, you know, what is this work? Who are these people? So I hope you get a good taste of it. I hope you stick around into the breakout rooms and get to know us a little bit more face-to-face. And with that, I'll pass off to Chris to start our presentation. Thanks, Kelsey. And welcome, everyone. I understand we have a range of folks here, people who were maybe involved in Edgy early on and are now coming back. Also some of you who may not have been involved in Edgy at all and are just getting to know us, we have tried to gauge this for everyone, all these different folks that we've anticipated are gathering here today. And I hope that it is not just the right level of detail and overview to give you a sense of what we've been doing within the scope of 15 minutes I have. So the race begins. Well, I think my first thought here is just about how long it seems since we got started. Five years ago, it does seem like it's a world away and for a lot of reasons. But I do think we've grown. I mean, we've changed in those five years. We've developed an agenda. We've developed a better sense of what we do. We developed a more sustainable sense of what we can do. We've, I think, found our place in the world as an organization going forward. I mean, we've started out and I think this really shaped how we began the transition to the Trump administration, kind of a crisis, an environmental and civic emergency. And we were all just thinking at that time, oh, what can we do next? The very next thing that's going to make a difference that's going to somehow enable us to push back against what we anticipated would happen with Trump in coming to Washington. I think we've learned a lot in that process, the four years that we've in which we've been seeing ourselves as pitted against the Trump administration, what's going on in that arena, we've learned also that they've really opened up fissures and demonstrated weaknesses in the larger landscape of environmental protection and environmental data. And I think that's where we found our footing in terms of longer term sustainable activities for edging and going into the Biden administration. I mean, that has been a transition and a good one. I think it's been nice to have an administration that's a little more environmentally friendly, but we've also found a lot of work to do there in repairing, not just in repairing the damage, but in fixing those fissures and gaps and weaknesses that we see in the overall system of America's environmental data and governance. For those of you who are less acquainted with us, we have about 50 active members now involved on Slack and so forth from academic institutions, also nonprofits, grassroots organizations, different kinds of groups. We're a variety of professions. We're social scientists and scientists. We're people involved in the nonprofit sector and volunteers from other walks of life retirees, some of us. Most of us are volunteers, and a lot of the work that gets done is by people lending their own time. What brings us all together, this diverse group, is what we aspire to do to hold governing agencies and industries accountable, reflect to promote and also reflect these values of transparency and collaboration, community-centric data and research, and we do seek to model those same values in our own organization and work, which is also a part of the task that brings us together. I need to say something about what enables us to have some paid staff, and that is our funders and our fiscal sponsor, we made the transition in the last year. I think both sides are pleased with that. We're also funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, ESIP, and CSNS, as well as all our volunteers are really our funders in a way, because they provide all that extra skilled flavor that really makes edgy tick. Just to give you an overview of the program areas, and I'll be going into a little more depth in each one of them, one of the things that edgy has done and continues to do is monitor websites, especially the federal environmental agencies. Another thing that we've done is interview EPA staff in particular, that's who we started with, but federal experts to get their vantage point on what's going on now and what should happen in the realm of governance and data. We also have been working on a front we call Environmental Data Justice to connect research and advocacy our own with principles of data, data justice, but I'll talk a little bit more about. And then finally, we have part of our group looking at and scrutinizing our own organizational structure to think about how to make it enable it to better live up to our values, values focused non hierarchical organization is what we keep aspiring to be and I think making our way there, although it's a lot of work there too. Now, some of you may remember back in early 2017, maybe the first thing you heard of edgy was about these data archiving events, this effort to save the data as the Trump administration was coming in there, people were worried that they would be the new leadership would go after vital environmental data that that had here to for been been unprotected and unguaranteed, but so so this was really a grassroots movement that happened across college campuses and edgy to laid a key role in it. We helped to design these events and coordinate the collection of the data and so on. Well, I think one one of the things that's happened is and you'll look this this this handshake icon now has a different set of descriptors to it. That's because our our data related activities have shifted in the last while. Now we don't really do that much archiving and the passage has come through this group that edgy help pull together called data together to have this kind of conversation about how better to steward data in terms of ethics in terms of best practices and also in terms of decentralizing the web. So decentralized web principles that that this group became involved in stating these principles working with the internet archive on that and subsequently where we've gone and our data work has been especially looking at EPA's enforcement and compliance history online. It's big database for enforcement and violation information and we've been trying to apply those decentralized web principles some of them to our work with this database starting by mirroring it and then developing customizable ways into it that can really get to what to what I think a lot of citizens and communities and groups want to see from this data in ways that go beyond what the EPA interface allows. So this gets to our first working group and you can see up here on the upper left hand corner the breakout room that you've been go to to ask and find out more. So this is our environmental data justice working group. This has been a real commitment of edgy is to explore this notion of environmental data justice which is coined actually by an edgy member looking into what a justice minded approach to environmental data would mean among other things how it might involve building better frameworks coming up with alternative visions for how to create to care for and to share environmental data. We've part of the work here has been writing academic papers such as the one you see here. Others other activities have involved webinars like the one you other posting you see here where we brought together six groups involved in environmental data justice related projects and they exchanged a lot of information and I think it was a very fruitful conversation there among the among the those involved were a group from Chelsea, Massachusetts, another the US indigenous data sovereignty network so getting these groups talking to one another and seeing what they can learn from one another. Now, environmental data justice, our working group on that has taken up the environmental enforcement watch and used that sort of area the database the Jupyter notebooks we used for the customizable data to work with communities and develop data platforms and visualizations and so on that really speak more to what these communities and local groups need. We've also in this group of the environmental enforcement watcher who has done its own reports and coming up with things like demonstrating the increase in violations in the Clean Order Act under Trump the reduction under enforcement actions with the COVID rules that the Trump people put in place and also various notebook or report cards based on the notebooks by congressional district and now they're working with groups to develop these same kinds of report cards for individual watersheds so that in connection with some of the watershed groups. So this has been a very fruitful area of work so extending our day to work from the archiving era the other another working group I want to introduce you to is web monitoring in the first years of edgy our web monitoring team really became the authoritative voice nationally for what was going on with federal websites in the Trump administration especially environmental websites so they're the ones who came up with the solid most solid and widely consulted information for instance about the erasure of climate change language from websites across the across the federal government and you know they they found they looked at all sorts of other angles of change as well and so they have continued that work into the Biden administration and and also bringing together a lot of their work from the Trump years so they came up with a this in the last year with a cumulative report called access denied on the changes under Trump really pulling together the four years of transformation federal websites and again the most authoritative numbers we have about exactly what the scale of change and the directions and change were they're also moving into academic publication for a lot of this information some of the first articles out there in the scientific literature on on this kind of in federal the content of federal websites and then also making it available for other people to research these kinds of this kind of data on website changes through this federal environmental wet web tracker which is a public data set of all the searching that they've done across the thousands and thousands of websites over the over the four years and beyond so so other researchers can now go in and do their own scholarship and investigation of website changes so in this whole frontier up for other researchers I did the other third working group is our interviewing and policy monitoring the interview project has now taken on the the rubric policy monitoring as well as interviewing in the expansion of his activities but it broke a couple of stories through the interviews over the last four years the the impact of the Trump people on the career staff at EPA and also the decline in enforcement our reports you can see the the covers here broke those stories and we've also been publishing in in academic journals and showing up at congressional hearings that that were partly inspired by some of the revelations we turned up well what this group has been doing more recently as they've started we have started a website called people's epa people's epa or ape ape it contains public histories of the agency's origins and various areas of its activity like toxics and climate change enforcement we're also putting up a beginning to put up our interview transcripts there from the over 150 interviews that we've done with epa staff we've got a repository keyword searchable of foyers from the environmental era from a host of environmental groups and now we're also doing a regular news feed of what's going on with the biden epa and you can find all the news feeds from january on there we're also we've also carved out some separate projects and looking at various areas of environmental governance and environmental justice so we're we're publishing articles on that and also on children's health is another one of the special areas that we've been focused on in policy monitoring and interviewing and finally let me bring up the uh is a part of that working group for the breakout rooms uh you can uh you can go hear more about the environmental history action collaborative which is our our newest working group uh coming on board starting in really late 2019 early 2020 to become a working group emerging out of the American society for environmental history and also an initiative to write a meekest brief for the juliana versus us a court case on climate change they've been involved or we've been involved in and working on annotations um and on annotations of biden as well as trump's speeches and op-eds and and so on um finally uh our last breakout room is going to be uh combining our work in radical or alternative organization and communications um we've this has been a big concern of us over the last four years and we're constantly visiting or revisiting these kinds of questions um among the outcomes more recently we've been honing our non hierarchical structure uh working on employment and making sure that the terms of our you know we have employees making sure that they're they're the terms of their employment are are uh as as good as we can make them and with benefits and and we look carefully at equity and salaries and and in hiring and so on and finally we've we've uh in the last while uh especially been able to and uh to uh expand our our influence across various media spheres and especially social media you can see some the the big uh followers followership and impressions and so on that we've been able to engage and we also have kept up uh steady presence in and news coverage and news articles with something like uh I think we've we've alternated we're still about 50 50 a year uh of uh news media coverage about of our activities so um that's uh a whirlwind tour of what we've been doing with an emphasis on the last while on the last year uh and I'll now um turn it over to I guess we'll go on to the next slide show we we're featuring uh one of our volunteers uh and she's going to talk or be interviewed a little bit about her experience working with edgy thank you chris that was really excellent and I it's my pleasure to introduce Marianne Sullivan who has been in who has been uh volunteering with edgy for quite a long time and I'm just going to ask a couple questions and Marianne you want to tell us a bit about the kind of work you do with edgy sure thanks calci yes i've been involved since uh january of 2017 with the interviewing and policy monitoring work group and through that work group i've been involved in conducting interviews with people at epa um with kind of data management and making sure those interviews stay secure and um confidential um lots of organizational tasks um sometimes working with students and sometimes working with other uh colleagues um writing papers writing grants um lots of different research activities it's it's really been wonderful I have to say I have to ask I mean that sounds like a lot of work um what what is it that makes you want to spend your time here doing that work when you could spend it anywhere yeah I guess um you know probably like a lot of us when Trump was elected in I guess it was November of 2016 is that right yeah um like a lot of us I felt sort of adrift and concerned about the state of environmental governance I mean he had really promised to do damage to the epa and um he was clearly not going to move us forward on addressing climate change and I was worried like so many other people and I didn't really know where to put that energy um but uh luckily Chris Sellers emailed me and said hey would you like to get involved in this in this group we're starting and and I said sure and what I found what I quickly realized was that it was a wonderful place to put all of that concern and fear and anxiety about the Trump administration because it gave me a real focus and it and it gave it allowed me to actually feel like I was making an impact with this group of people it was a wonderful group of people to come together with because we had shared values we had we have shared goals I think we had sort of a shared vision of what we'd like to see for environmental data and governance in the United States and so really to connect with those people was with all of you at that time was so meaningful um and really kept me kept me going during those four years of the Trump administration and and I do think we had an impact we we did start to help shift the conversation I think a bit around environmental data and governance in the United States so it was the people but there was more I think there was more it was also the work itself I think when we got into interviewing people at EPA it was just so interesting to hear their stories and to hear what was going on with them it taught me a lot about the inner workings of the EPA and all of the different programs that are in place in the United States to try to protect the environment and ensure the health of the population and then I also think that um for me the diversity of people involved in edgy has been really wonderful too because I've never worked really with people like you Kelsey who have all this data and programming knowledge or people like Sarah who bring together lots of different skills and it was just really inspiring to see the kinds of work that we could all do together as a group with our different skill sets so those are the things that really kept me engaged with edgy over the last several years thank you so much thank you for sharing I think in order to keep us mostly on track with schedule because I just realized I miscalculated the number of minutes in an hour I'm going to switch us into question and answers but thank you so much Mary Ann and thanks so much for the work you continue to do thank you so I'd like to invite folks all of you you're welcome to ask questions you can use the hand raise function or raise your physical hand and I'll toggle between screens or ask in the chat anyway that's helpful for you and then following that we'll head into breakouts at I think 35 past the hour makes sense so that we can have our 20 minutes in them so any questions that are sort of burning or that you'd really like to put out to the whole group before we go into the smaller rooms to have the more specific questions and I know it's been a fire hose of information if you're new here I'm sorry hi I'd like to ask a question I'm sorry I should have raised my hand maybe no you're okay I'm very new to this and learning about edgy I noticed based on looking at your twitter feed and what we talked about so far are you do you focus mainly on EPA concerns specifically that agency do you look at NASA and say land cover monitoring and such as well I'm I'm a land cover land use person in the GRP program I'm just wondering if you look at focus on their data as well I forgot to mention but any edgy folks are open to answer yeah go ahead question um so we different working groups um are a little bit different I'd say that um the interviewing working group is primarily focused on EPA and right now the data team um the environmental data justice slash environmental um enforcement watch team have been focusing primarily on EPA data um and also and I lead the website monitoring team and we I would say at least half of the like well maybe not that many but at least a third of the web pages that we monitor are from the EPA and there's the ones that we check most frequently just because they have you know well significant impact on environmental governance um but we do our we are monitoring NASA pages NOAA pages um you know we we have 13 different federal agencies that we monitor there's at least some section of their website but I'd say that the majority of our reports um relate to the EPA thank you Chris I see your hand yeah and I mean interviewing yeah interviewing policy monitoring we do we focus on EPA especially with our interviews but I think we've done also work on agency capacity that has gone beyond that included the other scientific agencies um and including NOAA and uh energy and interior and and so on I don't and NASA too I think uh was a part of that report looking at the trends and and budget and personnel and so on so to that extent yes we've looked at the at those other agencies thanks and just to add onto that from the um environmental enforcement watch perspective is we're very interested in kind of connecting this data on enforcement to other kinds of data sets so we're we're um looking at campaign um funding and trying to connect that to these kinds of data sets so um that's one sort of general question that I was wondering for folks who are new here or people who were contributing early on in edgy who are coming back is you know do you have ideas about where we could expand um particularly under the Biden administration like what would you like to see and and I guess that's sort of uh opening the floor back to you Dudley to say like other data sets that you think we should be looking at or ideas that you think we could investigate I'll save you from answering just now because I think we probably want to open up the breakout conversations which will give us a little bit more space to have more of these one-on-one interactions um and uh not hopefully I didn't cut you off but um Sarah if the breakout rooms are ready um so I think what's going to happen is you probably just gotta pop up with a breakout room you are welcome to assign yourself to one of those rooms and you should be able to move yourself around in between times if you over get lost you're always welcome to come back to this main room but I will see you at uh 55 past the hour for closing at the end Kelsey I'll just hang out here just in case anybody needs help getting to the rooms thank if anybody's confused about what the rooms are or what the groups are feel free to just raise up enough can explain what you know give you a reminder about what each topic area is yeah Dudley sorry I was writing a message to you and I and now I'm a little lost I think I want to head into the web there's a group regarding web tracking yeah so that's number two web monitoring how do I sorry let me see if I can if you look down at the bottom ah got it yes good all right anybody else need a hand it's good to see you Susie good to see you too and see you soon yeah fairly all right I'm supposed to go over to the room I clicked on number one Sarah but it's not putting me in there how weird um let me see if I can force move you oh I see oh join all right I didn't go oh moohy do you want to go in a room or do you already know all these things I'll just hang out yeah sounds good there's some of these just joined hi are you just joining the event we're in breakout rooms right now I can help you join one of them and let you know what's going on oh no I accidentally cut cut myself off I have been here since the beginning oh awesome okay no worries do you want me to assign you to a breakout room or do you want me to tell you what they are um I don't think yeah sure if you could remind me what they are okay so there's four options there's the one that's working on environmental data justice and environmental enforcement watch that's number one number two is the web monitoring group um number three is the policy and interviews and the environmental historian action um work and then number four is our organizational um committee like how how do we organize ourselves internally that's called rad org and communications awesome um I think I'll hop onto number one okay great I will assign you there thank you okay move here I think I'm gonna head into um room one I'll I'll be back sounds good yeah if anybody else comes in I'll guide them as well thank you I appreciate that yep but hello hi mark how are you oh hi how are you okay it's good yeah I I've seen your name on a number of documents that prepared me for the civic science fellowship uh with this first time I actually um able to be in a meeting with you so it's nice to meet you likewise pleasure's mine um were you in one of the breakout rooms earlier I was just in the the breakout room with Kelsey on eew uh we were just talking about our fellowship and the work that we're doing so far yeah no I'm so excited that uh you were both selected for that so congratulations yeah thank you I really appreciate it so we're uh we're getting started actually the last couple of weeks have been um you know we meet every Tuesday the Rita Allen uh pro yeah we're just starting to delve into some classes which is really good and very supportive wonderful um well I know that they'll be in breakout room for another nine minutes so if you'd like to join another one feel free to hop into another breakout okay and how do you pronounce your first name I'm sorry moohy moohy thanks Brad yeah okay thank you moohy okay okay nice to meet you and thank you for your support I appreciate it yep feel like I'm encountering you in the hallway okay great I see you're welcome to join another one of the breakout rooms in the meantime using that same breakout rooms tab or you're welcome to to stay here I just popped out to grab a call actually welcome back everyone just in case there are people still in their breakout rooms for the rest of the minute I'm going to hold off on the rest of the presentation for a minute sorry if that abruptly yanked everybody out of their rooms I thought it was going to give the 60 second warning and then we were all suddenly here but I see people in the rooms I think it didn't it's very confusing I got a warning I clicked a little x to get the warning out of the way and and it sent me back I think it's a little buggy it also labeled me with Shannon's name earlier and I didn't notice that I was Shannon until John was like you're not Shannon so I don't know what's going on but anyway having to meet you actually I think we're all here now um Chris would you like to share our last little visuals we just have one last slide um but essentially it's just a big thank you to everybody here um we really really appreciate you being here and coming to celebrate with us and coming to see you know what's going on with the different groups whether you've been around for a long time or a short time um and I would be remiss without adding a final check-in question which I would love for you to share in the chat just something that you heard today that resonated with you or something that made you excited about you know having come to this event um so please feel free to share in the chat and as you do and thank you so much Sarah for sharing the links in the chat too um as you can see we're we accept donations um that's always really really helpful it's not it's not so much like that that is a big ask is that it means a lot to us when we get a couple so um that's one of the links we put up here but two other links that also are really really important to us um the newsletter sign up Shannon has been doing a ton of work on making sure that we give people updates on our work more regularly that's one of the things that's been traditionally a struggle for us is doing a lot of work and then forgetting to tell all the people who should know about it um so uh we're trying to be better about you know blogging about the projects we've done and making sure they go to an email list and if you would like to be one of the people who learns about things um we have a twitter but we also have a newsletter and that can go direct to your inbox and then um Shannon and Gretchen have worked pretty hard recently on building a volunteer interest form to help us get better at when people show up and they say hey I might want to get more involved with edgy um you know that's pretty much how all of us how most of us get here not and not everyone we also do employment searches that are broader than that but we get a lot of different people who show up from all walks of life who say hey I think the work you're doing is really interesting um can I get involved and um we try to talk to each of those people one on one and see how they can get best plugged in and be a part of the work but also how we can be best support them how we can be a network that helps people achieve whatever they're trying to in terms of you know whether they're trying to build a a career in the space and policy and environmental governance or whether they're trying to like Marianne just trying to take some of that political energy that's very pent up in us when we get politically frustrated um I'm very frustrated with our local elections yesterday um and have somewhere to channel it into that feels really useful and impactful and I think our work really is very impactful um so I would love to see folks bringing in that that volunteer form um I think I mentioned earlier although I possibly forgot um if anybody wants to stick around after I know a lot of people here are our alumni who haven't seen us in a while so you're welcome to stay on afterwards for an after party um but other than that just thanks so much for being here I really appreciate it and and I'm really enjoying seeing you responding in the chat to what resonated with you today thanks all and since we've now hit six o'clock the official event is now over if anyone wants to just hang out